History and Sound Laws

[Sean Crist]

On Sat, 4 Sep 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Going back to what you first said:
> "The only reason we're able to say anything at all about prehistoric
> languages is that sound changes have a particular property, namely, they are
> exceptionless...>>

> I replied:
> <<In fact, by definition, we don't know anything directly about the sounds of
> prehistoric languages.   So we don't know, by definition, if the sound
> categories included exceptions or not.  But we have decrypted prehistoric
> languages without any knowledge of what sounds the characters represented.>>

> My point still stands.  "The only reason we're able to say anything at all
> about prehistoric languages is..." NOT sound changes.   In fact, historical
> science can say a lot about prehistoric languages - distribution in time and
> place, ethno-cultural context, probability of cross-lingual contact, literacy
> or non-literacy, what evidence (typonym, onomastic, written record, etc.) can
> properly be attributed to the time and place of that language, etc.  Even in
> some cases, what the writing may have meant.

You're misunderstanding my point.  In brief, my point is that if you deny
the regularity of sound changes, you kick the props out from under both
the Comparative Method and Internal Reconstruction.  All bets are off at
that point. Unless you come up with some new methodology which doesn't
rely on the regularity of sound changes, this leaves us with no way to
reconstruct prehistoric languages.

If individual sounds in individual words just randomly changed, I don't
see how we could project languages back into prehistory.  Fortunately for
historical linguistics, that's not how human language seems to work.

As for your point:

	 "In fact, by definition, we don't know anything directly about the
	sounds of prehistoric languages.  So we don't know, by definition,
	if the sound categories included exceptions or not."  [I assume
	you mean 'sound changes', not 'sound categories'.]

I'm afraid this is a misunderstanding.  It's quite true that we can't know
for certain what the phonetic values were for the phonological categories
in the languages we reconstruct.  That's not relevant here;  we're talking
about categories, not phonetic values. If a prehistoric sound change has
somehow admitted an exception, we'd often be able to tell (e.g. if the
first consonant of the PIE word for 'father' had somehow escaped Grimm's
Law, then the Old English texts would spell it 'paedar', not 'faedar').

> On 9/1/99 11:10:25 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu replied:
> <<The loans were were talking about were prehistoric loans, i.e. loans which
> occurred before the languages came to be written.  So I don't see the
> connection here with historical information.>>
>
> Perhaps I was unclear again.  Writing or lack of it is irrelevant.  If you
> are going to make a judgement about loans, you MUST do it on the basis of
> whatever information history (in the big sense, including "prehistory") gives
> you.  You will not be allowed to have Germanic borrow words from Polynesian
> in 700 BC, because "history" will not allow it.

Agreed.

> My point was that your conclusions about loans are based on "historical"
> assumptions about speakers of the two languages being coeval, being in
> contact, and about how such linguistic events happened in historical time -
> in the big sense.  In fact, you can't make any judgement about reconstructed
> loans without it resting on the assumption of a great many "historical" (in
> the big sense) facts.

But the problem is, the loan words are often our main evidence that
languages were in contact in prehistory.  This is true of the loan words
from Italo-Celtic into Pre-Proto-Germanic, for example; it's those loan
words which are our evidence that these groups were in contact.

> If any of those historical assumptions are wrong, you
> may get things wrong about those loans.  You may get, e.g., "the giver and
> the taker confused."

As I've said, you can often tell on purely linguistic grounds that the
loan has to have happened in one direction and not the other.  For
example, we can tell that 'skirt' was borrowed from Old Norse into Old
English and not the other way around, because Old English would have
changed it to 'shirt' (and it did in fact do so, with the ON cognate
'skirt' being borrowed later to give rise to a doublet).

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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